Officials Report 560 New Sinkholes in One Iranian Province After Floods

The once-fertile plains in Iran’s Yazd province have been afflicted by subsidence in at least 560 newly-identified locations, ISNA news agency has reported.

The mayor of Yazd, Abolghasem Mohiuddini, was quoted on Monday as saying that sinkholes had opened up across the province after the recent monsoon rains.

The deluge had up atop already-parched land no longer able to absorb it into underground aquifers, a pattern observed across Iran for years now. In some areas, Mohiuddini added, there had also been “problems related to urban sewage systems”.

The city of Yazd was listed as a UNESCO world heritage site in 2017. Its use of a traditional qanat system to draw underground water drew praise as “representative of the interaction of man and nature in a desert environment”.

Also on Monday, Hamidreza Pirovan, head of engineering at the Soil Conservation and Watershed Management Research Institute (SCWMRI) in Tehran, told ISNA that rates of soil erosion in Iran were seven times over what experts felt was a safe limit.

"When the surface of the earth is completely dry,” he said, “and also free of vegetation, heavy rains lead to floods due to the impenetrability of the ground.”